Paper Moon

Right, so. I'm tired of writing entries about how sadface I am about Squeenix not delivering what it repeatedly promised with the GanGan Online app. Thus, in the interest of making a more positive entry about the matter, here are some of my recommendations for Japanese manga that you can read on your iPad:

Zasshi Online. This app allows you to download the latest issues of hundreds of Japanese magazines, including some manga anthologies. A lot of stuff from Hakusensha's library is available through this app, including Hana to Yume, LaLa, Melody, Neko no Shippo, and tons and tons of volumes of out-of-print shoujo and josei manga. I found volumes of Akimi Yoshida's Eve no Nemuri lurking on this app (in the magazine section? I dunno why but okay!) so there's quite a lot available if you know where to look for it.

Shounen Sunday. Currently only Urusei Yatsura, Ushiro to Tora, Major, and Detective Conan are available through the Shounen Sunday app. However, you can download pretty much the entire print run of those four series for 450 yen per volume. This isn't a terribly good deal considering that a print copy of each of those books would still cost 450 yen, but, uh, at least now you have a way to carry around the entire Urusei Yatsura series in a portable format? And that's kinda-sorta worth the cost, right?

Weekly Big Comic Spirits. Again, only four series are available through the Big Comic Spirits app: Oishinbo, Utusurundesu, Otanko Nurse, and Chocolat. Same deal as with the Shounen Sunday app, but cheaper at only 350 yen per volume. Oishinbo is worth every yen of that 350 price tag, and Chocolat is too.

Harlequin Comics. Harlequin has made several of their Harlequin Romance comics available for free; many more cost 450 yen each. You can also download the free Harlequin Comics Magazine app, which gives you access to a 100-page monthly anthology of serial comics, although there is no way to download or save each issue of the magazine, which is not a very good idea when you're dealing with serialized soap opera comics. Anywhoo, my recommendation for a good Harlequin read is Yoru wa Betsu no Kao, the manga adaptation of Amber by Night. The first half is available for free on the Japanese iTunes store, but you have to pay 450 yen for the second installment.

Manga Rekishi. These lushly-illustrated manga biographies of famous Japanese historical figures are a staple of any Japanese school or library. The full-color manga are interspersed with edumacational historical footnotes and other bonus material. There's furigana for everything, so the reading level is fairly low despite the density of some of the text. Recommended: if you only download one book from this series, download "Himiko." If you download two, download the volume for Murasaki Shikibu as well.

A Witch's Song. Utterly adorable manga about an utterly adorable witch written, for some inexplicable reason, entirely in English. There are two volumes available so far, they're dirt-cheap at only 115 yen each, and they are both utterly charming and utterly hilarious.

Indie and Self-Published Comics. There is some seriously weird shit lurking in the Japanese iTunes store, yo. Some seriously weird shit. Some of it manages to pass itself off as acceptably avant garde, but most of it is just seriously weird shit.

Manly Manga. Trigun Maximum is available through Japanese iTunes. So is the Cobra manga. Just in case you thought that all of the josei romance stuff was starting to outnumber the manly stuff. ;)

...So in short, there's a lot of stuff available, just not nearly as much stuff as should be available if Japanese publishing companies weren't still stuck back in the twentieth century. But Hakusensha has a lot of their shoujo and josei manga available, and Shogakkukan has made a very limited selection of their popular shounen and seinen manga available to download. It's not much, but it's a start. So far Kodansha, Kadokawa Shoten, Shueisha, Hobunsha, and of course Square Enix are notably absent from the Japanese iTunes store - and, with the exception of Square Enix, notably not providing downloadable digital content in any other format, either. I wonder how like it's going to take the rest of these companies to get with the program.